The village of Nikola Lenivec is well known today, first as a staging ground for Archstoyanie festival, but also due to the installations of well-known artists such as NikolayPolisskiy and Alexander Brodskiy, among others. Villages, thickets, and glens strewn throughout the landscape contain dozens of works of art.
While at first these objects were placed outside of a central narrative, a need has arisen to properly organize this space in order to carry out the festival, and also to create an art-encampment, where artists could work and create - inspired by their natural setting.
Archpolis project became the first stage of conceptualizing the future development, as well as re-imagining the spaces of Archstoyanie, and assuming architectural and landscaping strategies on a full scale.
The frame that is created by the 20 garden chain - the organization of space - that is the locus of artistic activity, as well as the utmost expression of the contrast between the ordered and the uncontrolled landscape. Each of the twenty gardens contains/exhibits a unique combination of nature with a specific program, would that be a farm or the exhibition space, managed by a concrete curator.
The frame imposes 3 different scales on the territory, which working together, form main structure for the future development. The micro-scale of the gardens allows for intense programmatic use, with highly defined specific functions. The medium scale of the field inside the frame becomes a contained stage for temporary, ephemeral actions, such as the festival itself. The extra large scale of the landscape outside of the frame gradually regains its original state of unpolluted endlessness.
The project was done with support and input of Anton Kochurkin, curator of Archstoyanie, and of an architect Anna Shetinina
